If You're Not the One by Jemma Forte

Author:Jemma Forte [Forte, Jemma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472074478
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE PAST—STEVE

January 2000

At long last the most anticipated New Year’s Eve in history was finally out of the way and Jennifer couldn’t have been happier. It was enormously comforting to know she’d never be required to suffer the question ‘what are you doing for the millennium’ ever again. Well, not unless she planned on living for another thousand years. And in the unlikely event she did, at least by that point she’d be perfectly within her rights to answer, ‘Nothing. I’m not doing anything. I don’t get out much these days because by rights I should be dead.’

The pressure to do something ‘amaaazing’ had bored the pants off her. At work, what everyone was going to ‘do’ for the big night had been all anyone could talk about for months. Inevitably of course there had been a handful of smug people with bigger pay packets than her who had been able to say things like ‘We’re off to the Pyrenees’, or ‘I’m going dolphin watching in San Diego’ and even ‘we’re just going to a small bash for five thousand, in Paris, with fireworks’. It goes without saying that these people didn’t just earn more than her but also must have been stupidly organised. She and Karen hadn’t been able to find even a local restaurant for them and their friends to go to, that wasn’t either fully booked or extortionate, so as far as they could work out this lot must have booked these ‘experiences of a lifetime’ events when they were toddlers.

In the end, Pete and Karen had hosted the night at theirs. Dinner for twelve with lots of music and, if that had been that, it might have been a pretty enjoyable evening. As it was however, some bright spark had thought it would be a good idea to splash out on a couple of grams of cocaine, given the hugeness of the occasion. Only it was cut with laxative, so all taking it really achieved was to make everybody in desperate need for the toilet. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t long before the evening had taken a slightly grim turn for the worse. The bathroom had been permanently occupied, either because people were inside talking incoherent babble while preparing to shove some more powder up their noses or, because they were about to soil themselves. At times there’d even been a queue. Those who finally made it into the bathroom, after a buttock clenching wait, ventured out again looking sheepish and despite it being minus five outside, the window was required to remain open for the entirety of the evening. Not massively pleasant.

Karen had invited Pete’s cousin David to the dinner, purely so she could try and match-make him with Jennifer. David was relatively good looking but had been excruciatingly dull even before he’d got a line of crap cocaine up his nose. Mainly due to the drugs, his mouth had gone incredibly dry (unlike his sense of humour), to the extent that his tongue kept getting stuck to the roof of his mouth as he talked.

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